Political Participation: An International Social Science Council (ISSC) Workbook in Comparative Analysis (ICPSR 8350)

This instructional collection presents subsets of data from
existing national election studies which allow students to perform
cross-national analyses of political participation. Data are provided
for the following eight countries: Japan, the Netherlands, Norway,
United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, and Germany. These
countries were chosen by assessing the availability of ample and
comparable measures of participation in the context of a national
election, and by the presence of properties in these coutries that
seemed likely to highlight the advantages of comparative analysis.
Variables in the datasets reflect a perspective on political
participation limited to election and campaign activities such as
voting, working on behalf of a candidate, contributing money,
displaying a button or bumper sticker, attending a rally, and
discussing the campaign, as well as more general measures of interest
in and attentiveness to campaigns and politics. In addition, measures
of party identification and other demographic information are available
in these datasets.

This instructional collection presents subsets of data from
existing national election studies which allow students to perform
cross-national analyses of political participation. Data are provided
for the following eight countries: Japan, the Netherlands, Norway,
United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, and Germany. These
countries were chosen by assessing the availability of ample and
comparable measures of participation in the context of a national
election, and by the presence of properties in these coutries that
seemed likely to highlight the advantages of comparative analysis.
Variables in the datasets reflect a perspective on political
participation limited to election and campaign activities such as
voting, working on behalf of a candidate, contributing money,
displaying a button or bumper sticker, attending a rally, and
discussing the campaign, as well as more general measures of interest
in and attentiveness to campaigns and politics. In addition, measures
of party identification and other demographic information are available
in these datasets.

Access Notes

This study is intended for instructional use, and may be subsets of the original data. Variables and/or cases may have been removed to facilitate
classroom use.

One or more data files in this study are set up in a non-standard format, such as card image format. Users
may need help converting these files before they can be used for analysis.

Data in this collection are available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.
Please log in so we can determine if you are with a member institution and have
access to these data files.

Personal interviews served as the source for the
various national election surveys. The instructional datasets were, in
turn, built from these national election surveys. All the original data
from which the subsets were built are available through ICPSR. It
should also be noted that this collection was designed for use in
conjunction with a printed workbook. The accompanying text provides
details about the data, the populations they cover, and possible
analysis procedures. The workbook was developed and tested under the
auspices of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and by
UNESCO. Texts and data are made available as a joint venture of ICPSR,
the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (Bergen), the Institute of
Public Affairs, Dalhousie University (Halifax), and the Zentralarchiv
fur empirische Sozialforschung der Universitat zu Koln (Cologne).
Instructional data and workbooks examining other areas of comparative
research in the social sciences have been sponsored by the ISSC and
UNESCO. These include: TIME BUDGET RESEARCH: AN INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL
SCIENCE COUNCIL (ISSC) WORKBOOK IN COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (ICPSR 8542),
SOCIAL MOBILITY, [1973-1976]: AN INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE COUNCIL
(ISSC) WORKBOOK IN COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (ICPSR 8682), and
CENTRE-PERIPHERY STRUCTURES IN EUROPE, [1880-1978]: AN INTERNATIONAL
SOCIAL SCIENCE COUNCIL (ISSC) WORKBOOK IN COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS (ICPSR
7571). Copies of these codebooks may be ordered directly from the
publisher: Campus Verlag, Myliusstrasse 15, 6000 Frankfurt 1, Federal
Republic of Germany.